Helpful words
The Name of the Game: Emotes and Emotions in the Language of Games
- About: Naming
Naming in games can be blunt, poetic, or just plain weird, and Drew Scanlon has seen it all. From his time at Giant Bomb to producing shows for Twitch, he’s been at the intersection of gaming communities, the language of play, and digital cultural moments that become part of gaming and popular culture. We talked…
Is AI going to take my job?
- About: Naming
My job is to come up with good brand names: to find interesting, appropriate words for things. It takes time, effort, and is often seen as “the fun part” of what I do, which it is. I love my job. Another, more time consuming, and arguably more important part of my job is helping clients…
Branding for the Head and the Heart: An Interview with Made of Millions’ Esther Fernandez
Passion projects are a hot topic around here. We often daydream about which companies or products we would be enthusiastic to name from minor league sports teams to hammocks. Even though we mostly concern ourselves with working with kind and communicative folk, we all individually hope that our one dream project comes in the door….
What your merch says about you
In this role, few things are quite as satisfying as seeing a newly-launched name in the physical world—whether that’s on product packaging, a billboard, or a business card. Suddenly the intangible has become tangible, part of an environment where it can be observed, manipulated, and, hopefully, remembered. After recently being asked to evaluate names based…
The Life and Death of a Brand
- About: Naming
You could say it went down not with a bang, but with a whimper. First, our studio’s go-to grocery store sold out of our favorite flavor. Then it was all flavors. Then it was all stores. Was this a supply chain issue, or was this, somehow, the end? The meteoric rise of a local legend…
What’s Your About Page About?
- About: Naming, Positioning
The About page doesn’t get enough credit. In this creative industry of ours, most agencies, no matter the size, have a portion of their website devoted to communicating just who the hell they are and what they care about. But there’s a difference between what your About page says and what your About page does….
What happens when every brand on the shelf is designed to be different?
That’s the question raised by Pop Up Grocer, a curated retail experience in NYC described as “all the buzziest brands on Instagram under one roof” and “playland for packaging nerds.” It also asks, what if the inside of your pantry was edited by Dieline? Sandwiched between Manhattan’s Greenwich Village and SoHo neighborhoods, Pop Up Grocer…
More brand, less celebrity
Brands that could survive without big name backings There’s a special kind of paradox at the intersection of celebrity and branding. Fame, especially when wielded as an endorsement, is a shortcut: a fast-track to relevance, a built-in audience, a persistent spotlight that attracts attention before it might be justified. Brand building, on the other hand,…
The best brands no one is talking about
- About: Naming
When people talk about the best brands, the same names always tend to show up: Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, Disney, Patagonia, Ikea. So let’s take a moment and give these massive mega brands a round of applause. They mostly do a great job and deserve the credit. At some point, though, people get tunnel vision on…
If AI is so exciting, why is AI branding and marketing so boring?
- About: Naming
Living in the Bay Area, it’s hard to avoid AI ads. Driving on Interstate-80 through San Francisco is a gauntlet of 40+ billboards in less than a mile—nearly every single one is about AI. Ads on YouTube are the digital equivalent. Salesforce, IBM, SAP, Meta, Google, Apple (all links to their AI offerings)—every one is…